The Monday the Quilts Came Out
The neighbor
The house to our west sat empty most of last year after Walt Hendricks moved to Springfield to live with his daughter.
In January a woman named Courtney Hale bought it. She was thirty-eight, from up near Chicago, and she came by herself with a rented moving truck and a little gray car that still had a parking sticker from a suburban hospital on the windshield.
I took her a loaf of banana bread the second week. She opened the storm door about eight inches, took the bread, said thank you very much, and shut it.
I did not think much of it. People from the city are careful with their doors, and a woman alone in a new town has every right to be. I carried mail long enough to know that.
I waved when I saw her at the mailbox. She waved back, sometimes. Roger shoveled her walk twice in February without asking, because he was out with the snowblower anyway, and she left a thank you card in our door that said “Thank you for the snow” in very neat handwriting.
In early March she had a contractor out from Bloomington to build a deck off the back of the house. Cedar, sixteen by twenty, raised up about four feet off the ground, with a railing all the way around and wide steps down to the yard.
It faced east, toward the morning sun.
Which meant it faced my clothesline.
The letter
The letter came on a Thursday, the second week of April.
I knew it was from the village before I opened it, because Pam, the clerk, still uses up the old envelopes with the water tower printed in the corner. It was addressed to Marlene Fiske, with an e on the end. Somebody in a hurry had typed it.
Inside was a single sheet with “Notice of Ordinance Violation” across the top.
Under that it said: Nuisance, Chapter 8. Description of violation: Laundry visible from neighboring property. Fine: $50.00, payable at village hall within fourteen days, or the owner may request a hearing before the Board of Trustees at its next regular meeting.
It was signed by Jeff Marsh, who is our part-time code officer. Jeff also reads the water meters and plows the streets in winter. He is a nice young man who once pulled my Jeep out of a ditch on Route 2 in a sleet storm and would not take a dime for it.
I read the letter twice. Then I set it on the kitchen table, poured myself a cup of coffee, and read it a third time.
Roger came in from the garage around four, wiping his hands on a red shop rag. He saw my face before he saw the paper.
“What happened?”
I slid it across the table to him.
Roger is sixty-four. He worked thirty-nine years at the elevator, the last twenty running the scale house, and he is the quietest man I have ever loved. He does not talk when nothing needs saying, and in his opinion very little needs saying.
He read the whole page. He turned it over to see if there was anything on the back. There was not.
“Laundry visible from neighboring property,” he said.
“That’s what it says.”
“Your laundry has been visible from neighboring property since 1991.”
“I know it.”
He set the paper down and looked out the kitchen window at the line, and then past it at the cedar deck. Nobody was on it. A wind chime she had hung from the railing was turning slowly in the breeze.
“I’ll go see Dale,” he said.
Dale Brandt is the village president. He and Roger played Little League together, and they still sit at the same table at the Lions Club pancake breakfast every fall.
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
He looked at me.
“She went to the village, Roger. She didn’t come to the fence or knock on our door.” I turned my cup around on the table.
“If she wanted to talk to me, she would have. If I go over there now with this letter in my hand, I’m just the old woman who got in trouble and came to fuss about it.”
“You wouldn’t fuss.”
“No. But that’s how she’d hear it.”
He thought about that a while. Roger thinks about most things a while.
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to go pay it,” I said. “Tomorrow morning.”
He nodded slowly, the way he does when he expected me to say something else but is not surprised that I didn’t.
“All right,” he said. Then he folded the letter in thirds and put it in his shirt pocket, which I noticed and did not ask about.